Ernest Renan on Islam.

".... Islamism can exist only like official religion; when one reduces
it to the state of free and individual religion, it will perish.
Islamism is not only one religion of State, like was to it Catholicism
in France, under Louis XIV, as it is it still in Spain, it is the
religion excluding the State... There is the eternal war, the war
which will cease only when the last wire of Ismaël dies of misery or
is relegated by terror to the bottom of the desert. Islam is the most
complete negation of Europe; Islam is fanaticism, like Spain of the
time of Philippe II and Italy of the time of Magpie V hardly knew it;
Islam is the scorn of science, the removal of the civil company; it is
the terrible simplicity of the Semitic spirit, narrowing the human
brain, closing it with any delicate idea, any fine feeling, with any
rational research, to put it opposite an eternal tautology: God is
God... "

"Muslims are the first victims of Islam. Many times I have observed in my travels in the Orient that fanaticism comes from a small number of dangerous men who maintain the others in the practice of religion by terror. To liberate the Muslim from his religion is the best service one can render him."



Some parts still quite apposite today.